Thursday, August 7, 2008

Jason Taylor made a huge impact in the locker room his first week of training camp. The team arrived to the locker room prior to an afternoon practice finding a heap of stacked boxes in front of Jason's locker. Very shortly after, Jason started handing out everything Michael Jordan. I'm not talking about a couple shirts, guys were packing back four or five pairs of shoes, shorts, hats, anything you can think of with the Jordan logo on it. This was taken as an extremely grateful gesture by all the guys, some even teased it was his way of making quick friends. To my surprise, a week later and the Michael Jordan Christmas was on again. This time more guys were aware of what was going on, and because the first handout went so well the crowd quickly grew to over 20 players. From all accounts the second MJ handout was even more successful than the first.

Thursday, week three Redskins training camp and why wouldn't there be another enormous shipment of Jordan gear to Taylor's locker. Were talking thousands of dollars in gear and although it took me three weeks to gain interest into what was going on, I'm now hooked. Jason says, "They (Nike) just send me all the new stuff they're working on, I mean all the new colors and styles and I try 'em out." Well, not just Jason Taylor is trying out the new Nikes, because by handout number three, 40 Redskins were wrestling for anything they could get their hands on. If I didn't know better I would have thought it was a bunch of little kids swarming and begging for Jason's autograph, but the only name that mattered in our locker room was Michael Jordan. Some came away with boxes of goodies and some came away wanting.

I'm proud to say I came away with a couple great blog pictures, so everyone can thank me for sacrificing new shorts for the blog. Hahaha. (Some times I feel like I have to make the sarcasm obvious.) Before we walked out to practice Jason told me, "This will happen at least every two weeks and guys will never get used to it. I never know half the stuff they're sending cause it's gone so fast."